May 2018

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A Ministry of Economic Affairs official recently said that, if the proposed project for development of petrochemical is dropped, it would cause Taiwan to face shortage of ethylene by 2015.

Director-General of the Industrial Development Bureau, Woody Duh said that, after closure of the state-owned oil refinery CPC Corp., Taiwan's fifth naphtha cracker in Kaohsiung in 2015, this proposed project of the Kuokuang Complex would evolve as the most important supply source.

He said that, with growth of the economy, the demand for petrochemical products is set to rise, and thus the project is very much needed to balance the shortfall occurring due to closure of the fifth naphtha cracker.

Taiwan presently, with an annual production of three million tons, manages to fulfil around 97 percent of its domestic demand for ethylene, the official stated and also added that, 500,000 tons of this overall production is contributed by CPC's fifth naphtha cracker.

As construction of a petrochemical plant would require around four to five years, Duh averred that, if the Kuokuang project is not given green signal soon, the industry would confront shortage of ethylene, making it difficult for the industry to stand in competition with others in the region.

The official even revealed that, around four years back, Singapore started pushing its petrochemical industry, somewhere around the same time when Taiwan started promoting its Kuokuang project.

Singapore's petrochemical park has already drawn investments from the Netherlands and the United States, and the city-state now each year produces over three million tons of ethylene, extending tough competition for the Taiwanese petrochemical industry.

Kuokuang Petrochemical Technology Co., a partner firm of CPC, launched the Kuokuang project, to enhance the oil refining capacity and to boost production of petrochemicals like ethylene.

According to the conservationists, the Kuokuang Complex would generate negative effects, besides causing harm to the domestic aquaculture industry and the Dacheng Wetland, where the complex is proposed to be set up, it would also imperil the health of the residents of that region. All this together would subjugate the financial gains from this complex, the ecologists claimed.